I wrote the following piece for the essay collection "In Our Words" published by the Nashville Adult Literacy Council (NALC). In it, students and tutors describe what they learned in the program, which in my case is about 10x more than my student.

All You Need

My NALC student and I often talk about vegetable gardening--our successes (too many eggplants) and failures (hasn’t this been the worstyear for tomatoes!). We both plant a lot of peppers, probably because they thrive no matter what.

Recently, I was complaining about what to do with the plethora of Cubanelles and Jalapeños I had this fall and she suggested I pickle them. I’ve worked all my life in labs, so I immediately started worrying about how to set this experiment up. What salt should I use? What concentration? Should I incubate at room temp or 4°C? My student studied math in her native Egypt: she would have been happy to help me calculate the proper NaCl molarity for perfect pickling. Instead she told me this story.

Put water in pickling jar and start stirring in salt (regular is fine: Whole Foods not required). As you do, from time to time gently drop an uncooked egg into the water. Initially, it will sink, but when the amount of salt reaches the optimal pickling point, the egg will begin to float upward as its density matches that of the brine. Remove egg. Add peppers. Close jar. Wait a few weeks.

1. Tell Jimmy Kimmel that anything about me, including my emails, is boring.

2. Insult any parents who lost a child.

3. Call my opponent a name that is so obviously applicable to me!​Example: Let's say it becomes clear over the campaign that I can't stand spiders. Then how dumb would it be for me to accuse my opponent of being an "arachnophobe" ?!​4. Tell the same kind of jokes I did back at Highland Oaks Elementary School, like chortling over whether my opponent had peed on themselves.

5. Wear a white pantsuit. Ever.

6. Comment on how proportional my hand size is to any other part of my anatomy. (Will let voters decide.)

7. Send email invitations to middle class supporters inviting them to Cookie and Magic's or Amal and George's or Gwyneth's home for a mere $37K get their pic taken with me.

8. Make a huge deal about being "the woman's candidate" if I have by then acquired a spouse who seems to "like the ladies".

9. Do much campaigning in Mississippi.

​10. Let my doc publish my health report without me copy-editing it.

11. Get John Podesta, Paul Begala, or Ann Lewis to represent me on news shows.

12. Insult voters' intelligence with really dumb questions, like "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Buddhists say things happen only "when conditions are sufficient". That means, no need to sit around wishing roses would bloom or the dog would outgrow chewing. When conditions are sufficient, they will.

It's July in Nashville, and the weather is ghastly. No need to complain: when conditions are sufficient, that is, two long, hot, humid, mosquito/tick/chigger-infested months from now, it will cool off. Goal now is to meditate on something wondrous made possible by this misery.

Got it! The blooming of my Epiphyllum oxipetalum, AKA "queen of the night", a potted night-blooming succulent I schlepped from San Diego to LA to Nashville. Native to Central America, the "queen" is the world's ugliest plant most days. But for a few dreamy nights in late summer, conditions are sufficient for pink buds to emerge like a swan's neck literally on (epi) her waxy leaves (or phyllums) and then a week or so later open at twilight. By midnight the bloom morphs into a rosy-white globe fragrant with citrus, and then droops with exhaustion right before daylight, her one night of glory spent.

Today a young man came by to buy some furniture and saw the queen on my deck. He said his mother, who is Taiwanese and lives here, also has one, which was wondrous enough (queen fans abound in SoCal--San Diego even had an Epiphyllum Society--but we are rare birds here). This fellow knew his epiphylliana. He said its Chinese name, Tan Hua, means spicy blossom, but that because that bloom is so short-lived, Tan Hua is a Chinese idiom for what we call a "flash in the pan," as in, "Men Without Hats. Talk about a Tan Hua!"

That prompted me to look up the queens's name in Japanese. Wikipedia says it is "Gekka bijin", which means, "Beauty under the moon." Is there any more evocative thought? It immediately recalled a decade of summer nights spent "under the moon" (or under the flash of a digital camera) photographing this beauty on back decks and front porches of three cities.

Buddhists also say that you can see the universe in a flower, something no biologist would quarrel with. So I am grateful to the heat for allowing epiphyllum lovers one more opportunity to see the universe from our back decks. Conditions are almost sufficient.

I live in Nashville but San Diego is home. I lived there for decades and know its vibe like no other place. At least I thought I did.

Recently, in preparation for a month-long return there, I searched Airbnb for a SD rental. Clearly, home decor has evolved.

First, if you have not checked out Airbnb or sister sites like VRBO, their photos reveal how locals define "cool". For example, in the 10 years since I left town, San Diegans seem to have filled their homes with beach paraphernalia, like coffee table conch shells, dolphin-print duvet covers, and dried starfish on top of toilet tanks. Many even prop surfboards by the front door (don't all Nashvillians have a guitar leaning against the sofa in case they break into song?).

OK, I was a science geek in SD. So maybe my friends were outliers. But back then, none of us littered our homes with beach tsochtkes. I never had a Shamu sofa pillow or a "Just another shitty day in paradise!" poster on the wall. I don't think even surfers did.

Well the "sharing economy" has arrived in my (and your) hometown, and vacation rental sites are teaching us how to profit from it. Nashville, for example, is currently salivating to become a go-to travel destination for young hipsters (like in weekend date episode of Master of None). So to cash in, and make more money for CA travel, I will learn to stage my Nashville home for maximum turista buzz.

Cool, framed B&W photos of singers like Lucinda Williams or Billie Holiday. Who knew? Country stars (who btw put this town on the map) seem less effective.

A garish, retina-bleaching hot chicken poster.

An assertive wall sculpture spelling out N-A-S-H-V-I-L-L-E.

Will have to buy this stuff. Don't know a soul here who could lend it to me.

Contrarian postscript: Just found a VRBO SD rental in Encinitas. Encinitas is a SD beach town, but nary a Sea World poster in sight in the staging photos. In fact, it looks like what real people in Nashville and San Diego might call home. That, in addition to not wanting to find a starfish on the toilet in the middle of the night, is why I chose it.

In the mid-80's I taught biology at Coronado High School in California. In the back row of first period were 3-4 sophomore boys. They were "disrupters", annoying mischief-makers constantly vying for attention. But unlike the addled Motley-Crue kids, these boys acted out with theatricality and good cheer: if I hadn't been the teacher I might have found them amusing.

​The ringleader was tall with short, preppy-looking peroxided hair, which in San Diego might have meant he was a surfer. But up close, he was no surfer: he wore eye-liner, on upper AND lower lids, something I didn't even do. I'd seen pics of David Bowie wearing eyeliner, but this kid was in fact the very first eye make-up-wearing male I ever actually talked to.

That alone "disrupted" my 80's gender-unimaginative stereotypes, because it was clear that this boy was going to become a real hunk (like Bowie), a fact appreciated not only by me but by the disrupter XXs in the class (the kind that today would admire Lena Dunham.) Today, I recalled that student and wondered whether he and all the 80's misfits like him were also trying to comprehend that David Bowie is really gone.

Bowie wasn't part of a legendary band, and because something about him seemed to transcend reality, he wasn't the object of an Elvis/Lennon/Dylan personality cult. Nor had he started showing up in lame "bands of yesteryear" shows, like many of his contemporaries. Instead, he was simply a very weird genius whose personas were outrageous enough to keep fans engaged for decades in something new. There are few like him. Maybe Neil Young.

Everyone is talking today about Bowie's music. But the outliers will miss his totally unapologetic individuality. His great gift was to assure us ordinary folks that is perfectly OK, whether you are 15 or 69, to put on your red shoes (and eyeliner) and dance out your fantasies.

In that way, Bowie seemed mysteriously "outside" of time. And way ahead of it.

Years ago, KSDS, a San Diego jazz station, always played a Frank Sinatra classic at 7:10 am, in a feature called Coffee with the Chairman.

No matter where I was "at" in my morning, I made sure I stopped for 2 minutes, coffee cup in hand, to savor that tune. I did that for a year, during a time I recall feeling unusually grounded. The Chairman likely helped with that by providing a mandatory AND enchanting (you know, like Witchcraft!) anchor for the day.

A few years ago, on a Google+ broadcast, NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam reported that researchers at Harvard Business School no less found that eating rituals, like stereotyped unwrapping of a chocolate bar, enhanced folks' ability to savor the candy. Listeners invited to post their own rituals on Facebook responded that mundane tasks, such as nightly cleansing your face with your mother's brand of face cream, or getting their dogs "in line" each morning, centered them and made them pay greater attention to the moment.

Sound familiar? It should. Two years later, MIndfulness is BIG. Everyone's doing it, aided by body-scan tapes or cushions in lavender-scented rooms. But, you don't need all that stuff. I hope KSDS still runs Coffee with the Chairman, but if they don't, this will do just fine.

1. Download Songs for Swingin' Lovers! on Spotify. 2. Choose a time in your morning that you are most frantic.3. Prepare coffee or beverage of your choice right before.4. For one week, sit down for two minutes at time #2 with #3 and focus solely a cut from #1.

Zen Buddhists say things can be profound and shallow at the same time. That’s my take on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Saga Part I, which appeared in the March 1 NYTimes Sunday Magazine.

It elicited comments as riveting as the piece itself. The naysayers had a point: the noodling narrative about the Norwegian author’s car trip to Minnesota is annoying, like his hairdo: precious but trying to look unkempt. And his ideas seem as random as those duets Fred Armisen and Kristin Wiig sang as Garth and Kat on SNL. Knausgaard, like G & K, is either a genius or pulling something over on us. Probably both.

In My Saga Knausgaard retraces meanderings of Vikings and Scandinavian immigrants to the US as a meditation on place, while simultaneously getting a bead on modern American "culture". But first our narrator establishes that he’s shiftless, so we’ll take him seriously: He seems to think that forgetting to get a drivers license to rent a car for a road trip financed by the NY Times telegraphs that something deep is coming. Takes a while, though because first there’s a sophomoric subplot about travelers’ bowels and a stopped-up toilet.

As the story progresses, the narrator's chutzpah is almost funny: how could anyone think that driving around the midwest for a week could illuminate why cities he encounters on the way like Detroit are in crisis. Even his photographer asks, "So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?"

So low-hanging fruit gets picked. Like, the author hears a lousy cover band in a Detroit dive and sees it as metaphor for the death of Motown. Or he “discovers” that a lot of Midwesterners are fat. (Good news, writers! The Times will pay for that kind of insight.)

So who cares what this guy thinks?

Well, despite all this I did, because no one talks about landscape, be it Newfoundland or Detroit, more movingly than Knausgaard. His channeling of the Vikings loneliness in Newfoundland and their homesickness for Scandinavia made me cry. Read it just for that.

(Kudos also to the photographer, Peter Van Agtmael, not only for the art but for putting up with this guy in a car. Note: he also got hammered by some naysayers who wanted prettier Detroit pics.)

The landscape part must be good because after that, Knausgaard’s gee-whiz analysis of what’s wrong with the US strikes starts to ring true. Take his first view of Detroit:

“I’d seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I’d never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight--house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster--if this was poverty, then this must be a new kind of poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth."

Or this, after too many days on the interstate:"I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did.... The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams…. Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?”

The truth is, whether these opinions are adolescent or well-founded, we Americans lament the same stuff. That he's Norwegian doesn’t make these concerns less valid. So I'll read My Saga Part II because the author has guts: there is nothing easier and harder than being an outsider. Easy, because it's a no-brainer to see what's wrong with other people’s lives, culture, neighborhoods, or hairdo. Hard, because you might be right, but for sure you'll be lonely.

San Diego is a city so mellow and beachy that it's reflexive to answer inquiries about your day with, "Just Another Day in Paradise!" I know. I said it all the time.

Lest you think that's how Californians talk: wrong. I also lived in LA, a city too interesting to be called paradise. (Plus it is difficult to envision navigating paradise along the 210 down the 57 to the 5 to the 405.)

I now live in Nashville, where summer heat and humidity is hellacious. By August paradise's opposite often comes to mind.

But what magic spring works! This beautiful May afternoon a neighbor was out watering his irises, which are going full tilt. This being Nashville, he of course waved hello but then added, "Just another day in paradise!"

Nashvillians love their vibrant funky hometown as much as San Diegans do theirs, but I have neverever heard a Nashvillian say, JADiP!

But that's how bonkers we've gone after 6 months of ice storms, bitter cold, and then endless rain. Suddenly we're spending grocery money at Home Depot garden center to celebrate those few months when it deliriously sweet to be outside.

2.One of my relatives saying that a participant, Viola Liuzzo, (a white Northerner murdered a few weeks later), “got what she asked for.”

3. Years before, a first grade teacher in Philadelphia telling my classmate Cherry that she could not walk home with me because she was black (hadn’t noticed until then).4.My dad explaining that a park we always went to on family visits to Montgomery, Alabama, was closed because courts ordered it integrated.

5. Over lunch in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Montgomery bus boycott, an acquaintance of my mom's saying, "Our nxxxxxs down here are gettin kinda surly." (Learned a new word: surly!)6.A house near ours in Arcadia, California, where I went to high school, vandalized after neighbors learned a Chinese family was moving in (Arcadia is now at least 60% Asian-American.) 7. That the famous namesake of a research institute I worked at in California refused to relocate there until La Jolla realtors would sell homes to Jews.

8. Utter disbelief on revisiting Birmingham 4 years ago to discover that the airport is named for the divinely insane and courageous Fred Shuttlesworth. 9.Days after the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act on June 25, 2014, the Texas Republican party calling for repeal of what’s left of it and Mississippi assuring us they'd enforce voter photo ID laws. 10.That this morning's NYTimes says (my paraphrase) that the Ferguson, Missouri, city fathers systematically harassed and then financially milked poor and minority citizens.